


love me, love me, say that you love me

by banjjakz



Series: into the woods [2]
Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Developing Friendships, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Other, Pet Names, Unresolved Romantic Tension, hehehehe, mc is comforting muri and gets a little too carried away, tldr you call him baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 18:59:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19470142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banjjakz/pseuds/banjjakz
Summary: “Baby,” you whisper before you can stop yourself, tucking a lock of hair behind the crest of his ear.Muriel’s gaze immediately snaps up to meet yours. His face blossoms a vibrant red.





	love me, love me, say that you love me

The both of you are bustling about the kitchen, getting ready to prepare breakfast, which isn’t an uncommon occurrence. You’ve been spending more and more nights at Muriel’s humble abode, much to your master’s chagrin; Asra teases you each morning you return to the shop, hair still mussed and clothes still wrinkled from a night of sleeping on a hay-stuffed mattress.

Today, however, the shop is closed, and you are excited to do whatever it is fate has in store. Well - that is until you catch sight of the woeful lack of seasonings in the meagre pantry system Muriel had installed (mostly for the benefit of you being able to find things in his hut.)

“Muriel, we’ve run out of spices,” you call out to him, turning just in time to be met with a faceful of hairy mountain man chest. He has an awful habit of rushing towards you immediately upon any beck and call; far too often, you must reassure him that not  _ every  _ invocation of his name is made in distress.

He hums, reaching around you easily to do his own examining of the cabinet of nonperishables. You can feel the thrum of his vocal chords reverberate underneath your skin. 

It makes you shiver. He shoots you a sidelong glance, flushing when he realizes just how close he is. He quickly straightens up and puts a sizeable distance between the both of you.

“So we have.” He refuses to meet your eyes, face pink and spasming.

“Shall we go to the market?”

His face falls almost comically quickly into its usual indignant dissatisfaction. “Why.”

“We need spices to make breakfast, of course.”

“Food is food,” he grumbles, “it all tastes the same.”

“Oh? So you’d be content to never again taste Asra’s roasted blue-tongued skink?”

He goes red once more. “...That’s different.”

“How?” When you get no answer, you draw nearer, taking his hands into your own; he jumps, but doesn’t pull away from the touch. “Muriel,” you call, softly, “Hey, hey. We don’t have to. But I’d like to go into town to pick up the spices, and anything else we may need. If you really don’t want to, I won’t make you. It’s your choice.”

Muriel takes a moment of silence to breathe, eyes closed and lips pursed. Eventually, he relaxes, and a resigned  _ let’s go  _ falls from his tightly pressed mouth.

You smile softly as you release your grip on his hands (and try not to overthink the way his fingers twitch almost longingly at the loss of contact).

“Great. Off we go, then.”

  
  


Inanna trots beside the both of you, panting happily with her tongue lolled out, looking more like a domesticated house pet than the fearsome predator she really is. It’s cute, you think, how easily she exists in your presence. You’ve always been grateful for how kind she’s been to you, how all of the things and animals and components of Muriel’s life have eroded their edges to grant you access.

The crowd parts way for your little posse, though that’s probably due more in part to the elbow-shoving and power-walking lessons you’d received from Portia, rather than anything having to do with Muriel.

Even despite the memory-loss spell that cloaks him, he is still very obviously stiff and uncomfortable to be amongst other people. You sneak a hand down to curl up in his own, smiling in what you hope to be a reassuring beacon of hope when he whips his head down to you. Gently, you squeeze.

You try not to appear  _ too  _ pleased when he squeezes back - albeit, shakily.

It takes little to no time at all to find the spice stall in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace. Coins and jars are exchanged quickly (you cringe at the inflated prices) and thank the seller once more before pivoting on your heel to face Muriel. 

His face is wet with perspiration, cheeks sporting such a brilliant red you’d think he was still reeling from some of your teasing had you not just been preoccupied for the last couple of minutes. His entire body shakes with exertion - from what, you cannot say; not until you notice the unmistakable sheen of his eyes, the way dewiness clings to his lashes, the telltale quiver of his bottom lip.

Muriel is panicked. He’s panicking.

Inanna whines at your side, pawing up and down your leg as she looks pleadingly into your eyes.  _ Get us out of here,  _ she seems to beg. Or, rather,  _ get  _ him  _ out of here. _

You nod swiftly once, twice, before pulling them both along. “Come,” you say quickly, urgently, whisking your party of three out and away from the hectic activity of the marketplace. 

With one hand clutched around your bag of purchases and the other woven tightly in between Muriel’s, you flee, steps coming down hard and harried on the cobblestone underfoot, until you reach the edge of the crowd, at which point you chance a glance back at Muriel to see how he’s faring; he’s still pale, still panting, still wet in the face, but he doesn’t seem on the verge of something worse, which he had been prior to your escape route.

Once safely secured in a back alley, you drop his hand from yours and gasp at how sweaty your palm had grown from his.

“Muriel,” you say, but he doesn’t seem to hear you, pupils blown wide and black as he stares determinedly at the scuffed leather of his boots. “Muriel,” you repeat, drawing closer as Inanna circles anxiously around the two of you. 

You approach him slowly so as not to spook. “May I see your hands, please?”

Without speaking or looking up, he raises both his palms. You take them and hum lowly underneath your breath, summoning cooling magic to bring his body temperature down; you’ve noticed that heat only exacerbates his symptoms of panic, and the first priority is always to cool him.

Blue light glows in between where your hands are joined. Once it dies, his calloused palms are blessedly dry once more, and the brunt of his tremors have mostly subsided.

Gently, carefully, cautiously, you raise a hand until it lands underneath his chin. You spend a moment just stroking the soft stubble there, scratching slightly with the smoothed nail of your index finger, before nudging his head up.

His eyes are so, so strikingly green - eerily reminiscent of the forest in which he confines himself, the forest which he probably longs so badly for in this moment. Those same eyes - the ones you’ve sought out in times of your own grief and strife - now shine brightly with unshed tears, tears that  _ you  _ could have prevented.

Absently, you register the sound of the bag of spices dropping to the ground.

“Oh, Muri,” you sigh, encompassing as much of his face as you can hold in the both of your hands. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine.”

When you start to remove your hands from his face, he makes a distressed noise and holds them in place. “I-I didn’t say stop…”

Everything in your body melts into a warm, gooey, goopy puddle. You’ve heard him utter this phrase what seems like a thousand times in a thousand different tones, and yet  _ this  _ is the day that it affects you the most.

Or perhaps it is a culmination of all those times. Every shy glance, every hesitant grip of your fingers, every concerned arm thrown around your shoulders, every longing look has led up to this moment:  _ here,  _ in this seedy, back alley, where anyone could walk by, where booze still wets the gaps in between the cobblestone below.

You realize, rather belatedly, that you’ve fallen for him. 

To your surprise, Muriel presses further into your touch. All noise from the outside world seems to fall away, until only you and the man in front of you exist in your own little realm, playing by your own rules.

Dark hair falling into his face, bottom lip tucked between his teeth, he’s in a state so vulnerable that you almost have to make sure this isn’t a product of your own yearning.

“Oh, baby,” you whisper before you can stop yourself, tucking a lock of hair behind the crest of his ear.

Muriel’s gaze immediately snaps up to meet yours. His face blossoms a vibrant red.

“Sorry. Sorry, that was, uh - well, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. If that was too much, then I--”

He brings up a hand to cover your lips. 

“You talk too much,” he says, so quietly that you have to strain to hear him. 

“Yeah. So I’ve been told.”

“...It’s...alright. I don’t mind.”

“You don’t?”

Eyes softening, he moves to run a hesitant hand through your hair. “No. I don’t.”

_ Gods,  _ how badly do you feel the urge to press your lips against his, to transfer the affection you so strongly feel into something tangible, something he can feel as well. You spy a barrel only mere feet away and smirk.

You break from your close proximity (shushing him reassuringly when he makes a noise of distress) and snag the barrel, setting it down in front of him before heaving a foot over top of it and testing your weight; when it doesn’t give, you clamber onto the lid so that you’re lip-level with the bridge of his nose.

It takes a straining flex of your tippiest-toes to press a kiss onto the rough, worn skin of Muriel’s forehead.

_ “Baby,”  _ you say once more, sighed lowly against him. You can feel the heat of your breath wash over his face. He practically melts against you, head dropping into the crook of your shoulder, and you can feel the tension drain from his shoulders.

Working your fingers into his scalp only feels right, and so you do it, relishing in the way a deep rumble starts up in the pit of his chest, not unlike a cat’s purr. 

Perhaps it’s inappropriate of you two to be so brazenly affectionate in public, even if it  _ is  _ in the back of a dead-end, offshoot alley. You’ve got Inanna to warn you of any curious passersby, and your first priority is admittedly not propriety, nor is it consideration of the general public’s attitude towards PDA; your first and most important priority, as always, as it has been ever since you met him, is Muriel. 

You can’t help but to feel as though the precedence he takes in your life is familiar. You feel as though you’ve known him far longer than you yourself realize. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but not an unwelcome one. Certainly not an upsetting one.

At some point, you will have to step off of the barrel and extricate your fingers from his hair and leave his warmth. As inevitable as the tides rolling in, as the moon making her cyclical shifts, you are always pulled from Muriel, one way or another.

But for now, you relish in the sanctity the both of you have created. Just for a little while longer. 

_ Baby,  _ you think to yourself, sighing against the crown of his head.

The  _ ‘my’  _ is left unsaid.

(You hear it loud and clear, anyways.)

**Author's Note:**

> hello! i am very new to the fandom so please let me know if anything is wrong.. thank you for reading!  
> my tumblr is [@myrrheart](https://myrrheart.tumblr.com) and i take headcanon requests and prompts!


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